After an evening of this you feel that the traders are a much misunderstood lot until, in the missionary's Sunday sermon, you hear them sorrowfully referred to as "our sinful brethren whose very existence here would have been impossible had not our teachings shown the savage the error of his blood-thirsty ways." Then you realize that it is the trader who, after all, is in the wrong, until, on the following day, you drop in at a copra shack on the Broom Road for a drink of coco water, and learn that it was missionary denunciation that was responsible for the massacre of Boyle and Wells at Rangaroa in 1891, and that the captain of the missionary schooner, Croix de Sud, was severely censured by the governor for abandoning the trader, Wilkes, to his fate during an uprising in the Tongas in 1903.
At heart, of course, you are in sympathy with the missionaries, so that it is with a secret satisfaction that you hear the ascetic, frock-coated gentleman, whom you fall in with a couple of miles farther along, nail these last stories as "unmitigated and devil-inspired lies," and go on to cite "unimpeachable authorities" to prove that traders instigated the "cutting out" of the missionary schooner, Morning Star, in the Hervey Group in 1899, and that traders were guilty of having incited the natives who killed Chalmers in New Guinea a year or two later. In spite of your sympathies, however, your confidence in the missionaries is badly shaken when, in the pauses of the hula which has been arranged for your especial benefit, you get "the real straight of it" from "Kangaroo Pete" the same evening, but how ashamed you are of your doubts when you meet the "Board of Conversion of the Affiliated Missionary Societies of the South Pacific at the Consulate" the following afternoon and hear the members "lay bare the mainspring of every action" of its representatives since the days of the "blessed John Williams."
Vacillating between the Scylla and Charybdis of "Missionarydom" and "Traderdom," and torn by the conflicting currents of doubt and belief, you end by soundly rating yourself as an invertebrate weakling incapable of forming a fixed opinion on any subject, and decide to take the advice of a sagacious Australian traveller who said that he had found the best course to pursue in the South Pacific was to "trade with the traders and 'mish' with the missionaries." But, as I have already pointed out, that you are quite as likely to come to grief as a non-combatant as in carrying a pike, the experience of our party in endeavouring to discharge its social indebtedness in Tahiti goes to prove.
The best characterization I have heard of social Papeete was that of a visiting Englishman who applied to it what some other Englishman once said about Hammersmith—"A lot of variegated grievances, each unit of which believes himself a little tin Providence on wheels."
The truth of this astute observation will hardly be brought home to the run of visitors to Tahiti who, stopping over but the few days between boats, have more opportunity to receive than to dispense entertainment. By us of the Lurline it was never suspected until, in a devil-inspired moment, we decided to wipe out our accumulated obligations in a single day by giving a tea and a sail in the afternoon and a buffet deck supper, with fireworks, in the evening. What an excellent idea, that of the two functions, we told ourselves—one for the "earth-earthy" set and the other for the "church-churchy" set. How lucky it was that the line of cleavage between them was so clearly demarked!
We called in the suave, diplomatic young consul, with his intricate knowledge of the most recondite of the cogs of the wheels within the wheels of the machine of Tahitian society, and started on the list for the afternoon affair, to which the "missionary set" was to be invited.
"Father Le P——," we began.
"Yes," acquiesced the Consul.
"The Reverend D—— and family."
"Ye-es."